Transcript of Taped Interview : 21/7/1998 Lee Harris
Lee had thought to remove this extract from a taped interview from the site, as it has
yet to be fully edited, but it provides such an insight into the times and events through
which he has lived with such clarity. So until we can truly do it justice we will continue
to present it here in its raw form.Oral History:
Interview conducted by Harry Shapiro
Transcribed by Amira Harris
I noticed in that press cutting back in the fifties in South Africa that you were
an early advocate of legalisation. What was the situation with 'dagga' in
South Africa at that time?In my early days in South Africa, as a teenager or growing up in the mid fifties, it was
political. But the only experience I had with 'dagga' was as the 'jungle cigarettes', the
terrible dangerous weed, like Reefer Madness. It was used by the white motor mechanics
and fitters who were called 'jollers'. 'jollers' is fighters, so it was associated often with violence,
like there was a cutting of an African woman who was taken and given these jungle cigarettes,
and then raped, so 'dagga' was a terrible fear. So I did not know about 'dagga' from any
experience, only later when I came back to South Africa in 1967.So that press cutting of you as an advocate...
was taken at the height of the summer of 67. I went back to South Africa. Basically I was about 26/27 in London and had been to drama school and discovered the West End, the dives, the holes of society. And I had some South African friends come over and I tried a pep pill. I came to England in the beginning of 1956.
You were in South Africa, Why did you leave?
I left at just turned nineteen, because I was politically involved in the African National Congress. In the Congress Movement, the Congress of the Democrats was the white movement, there was the Indian Congress for coloured people and it was separate, and I had a sort of spring awakening. I was working in a factory, and I was from quite a poor Jewish family and had not bothered to do night school, my matriculation, and not bothered to pass. It was almost everything bar history. So I became involved in the political movement, and it was also a personal liberation, from an unhappy stepfather and a home. I could not wait to get away, and England was the obvious place.
Did you have to leave or did you want to leave?
I was raided and knew I would have my passport taken away, and I was getting heavily involved in anti-apartheid things, like writing slogan paintings, like 'police raids, police state' and doing that at one o clock in the morning, and going to the factory at six-thirty in the morning on the bus, and everyone standing up and there were the letters that we put up. So my first things I learnt at eighteen was that police raids represented a police state, because I had learned to hide away books under my bed that were banned.
Did you mention Nelson Mandela as well?
That whole episode was one of the most exciting periods of my life, because I came into the Congress Movement through a cousin and a discussion group, which was a Friday night group where great speakers would come, and through a Dr. Ronnie Press, they were organising this great conference at Cliftown location during the 25 and 26 of June 1955. And in going to meetings and handing out leaflets, and going to offices, this Ronnie Press took me to an office of two lawyers called Mandela and Tambo, because I saw it on the door, and I remember being new in all that period, I was only eighteen and I dared not open my mouth. I was a political innocent, so I sat there taking it all in and I met Father Huddlestone and went to his farewell party in Johannesburg because Sophiatown was being taken down. And I went to the townships on Sunday morning with people talking to the Africans to come to this conference of the people, and everywhere I would go, plain-clothed police would say in Afrikaans 'Ya die fucken Jude', 'these fucking Jews' you see. So I went for the two days to Kliptown location and on the second day sitting there with many illustrious people who are now very big, Trevor Huddlestone stood up on the platform in his cassock and said "can we all please be quiet, but we are surrounded by armed police." And it was like a movie, I looked up and everywhere there were two hundred police with rifles mainly black, and the head of police walked through this gathering of 7,000 people in a field in Kliptown location, and as the policeman walked towards the platform, the whole crowd stood up and sang the 'Nkosi Sikelele Afrika' which was one of the most emotional and powerful moments of my life. Hours later after being photographed and searched. I was the young boy of eighteen selling all the political newspapers, 'The New Age' with 'Fighting Talk' which were edited by Ruth First, whose husband Joe Slovo, was blown up in Maputo by a bomb. She was a magnificent woman, her daughter was Gillian and there was Shaun Slovo. They made a film on one of them. So there were lots of very interesting people there, so it was a great awakening to realise there is such a thing as bad laws, because they used to sing the song in 1951 'when defiance was begun, mounting oppression is the cause'. Bad laws were the cause for mounting oppression and the Minister of Justice did not know what to do, so we were aware that people were for direct action, coming and sitting with black people, often academics, in a white tea room at the Zoo Lakes, until police were called and people would be arrested. It was very bold, and Dr. Yusaf Daddoo, was buried next to Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery, who was the head of the Indian Congress Movement and a great friend of Mandela, who was honoured by the African National Congress. And I met Chief Lethule daughter through Trevor Huddlestone. so it was a very exciting time, and that was my first time I came across 'dagga', because on Saturdays with a friend, another young Jewish guy, I would sell New Age in the poor white area of Johannesburg, and go into the back of these empty shops, mine compounds which were often black male workers, migrant workers. But we would often go into these shops and knock at the door, and come into these back-rooms, where there were five/six Africans sitting round in a circle, this was 1955, with broad-rimmed hats and suits and I could smell this pungent thing and they were smoking these cigarettes, and I was an utter innocent, and I would tell them about that the revolution would come, and asked them for a 'tickey' which is a threepence piece, and sell them, often they could not even read, New Age, the political magazine, because I was very committed so I would get the tickey and tell them the revolution would come, and smell the stuff, and look at their blood-shot eyes. But only in retrospect did I realise of course I was in 'dagga dens' but I was such an innocent, so I never saw anything bad and looking back they were very nice to me.
So this was very much a black working class thing?
Yes, oh definitely. It was a very big thing with white people in South Africa at that time, dagga was of course for the white motor bike fitters, the mechanics, they were called 'jollers', or the 'duck-tails', this was 55, this was the beginning of Elvis Presley, the first excitement of Rock n Roll, and I had my duck-tail and my Brylcream for my hair.
So all of that penetrated South Africa then?
Oh yes, I think Elvis hit like a bomb in there, and of course dagga was cheap on any second corner. Mutter, Mutti, it had all sorts of names, and it was feared as jungle cigarettes, to middle class white boys like I.
It was the sort of thing you would do if you wanted a bit of a walk on the wild side?
Yes, but from my background, I do not think I would have come into contact with it, because I was like an innocent, at eighteen or nineteen, I had seem my first homosexual, so even that, so someone who looked a bit feminine. So when I came to London and I was completely innocent, though I had been born in a big city and been brought up in Johannesburg, but I had been a serious political person, and then I came over to England beginning of 1956 thinking I am free, free, free, I can do what I like in life, so I thought I would want to be an actor, so I went to drama school for two years here, at the WebberDouglas. During that period with a friend I discovered the dives in Soho, because at that time in the late fifties, the West End was full of about a thousand prostitutes, you'd find then all round Piccadilly Circus, in Wardour Street, in Brewer Street were the cheaper ones, and there was the coffee shop revolution, that was the 'gaggia' shop, and the Italian spaghetti and Soho was the centre. The Two Eyes, Heaven and Hell, next to it there was the Artisan, which was the left-wing coffee bar, and there was the all night one, the Nucleus in Monmouth Street which was a jazz dive, and there were little basement clubs in Wardour Muse then, where I would go with my friends and 12-1 o clock at night, I was twenty, and the music was amazing, the dances were utterly amazing and all the girls were prostitutes, and come down for rest from the time, and lot of the men were the pimps who looked after them, and would go on the street and do business and come down there. And my first awareness of a drug raid was in a club, I read in the Evening Standard, one night that the club had been raided, for Indian Hemp, which is from the cuttings in the fifties. I was aware at the Nucleus, and there was Ratbone Place, because that was the 'Beatnik' period, 'Lord Sandwiches' and 'Bungees Coffee House' where I worked for two years which was a folk singer. The music scenes then were the Skiffle, and the Tradclubs. Ironically the Tradclub in Hen Yard became the Mod club later the scene, because it was before your time. The Trads would dress up in their waistcoats and Victorian clothes and women up in the black lace-up shoes and dance in a certain way. There was the rock and the was the Folk Singer, and the beatniks were mainly the people who travelled up and down the country and stayed on the South coast on beaches and had a bit of long hair, but were not as intellectual as we were aware in the late fifties with On the Road. And I was at drama school and mixing with arts students, weekend bohemians, we used to go down to coffee shops and wear a polar-neck sweater and jeans or T-shirts and go sit and drink coffee and talk Camus or Angst pr phenomenology and Sartre, which was the part of the scene there and of course Elvis, who for anyone who really loved him, he was dead by after Heartbreak Hotel, I mean he became a commercialised and the excitement was so short.
Amongst that group which presumably were probably also the main marijuana smoking group, I mean they would have been into Elvis Presley?
Well to be quite honest, I thought of myself as a rock n roller because I loved rock n Roll dancing, just to dance to the music is like the great excitement, and to do all those turns and marvellous flingings or whatever and the beat. I do not know much about, I presume that it was small coteries of jazz musicians, bohemians, might be a few travelling beatniks, people who had been to Limehouse or Merchant Seaman, because there was a big London dock area, and there were clubs there. They belonged to the dives, like that club in Wardour Street, prostitutes mostly, and by the middle of the fifties of course the first boats had come, and the West Indians were coming in, so there was a whole subculture building up.
Presumably you did not get involved in the black community in the way that you did till some time later?
Quite rightly so. I like broke from the South African political scene and pursued a career, first two years at drama school and six nights a week washing up dishes in the West End, so I was Stuck, I was a great lover of the gutters, I went through this period when I came here of dark nights, I've got to go through the night, I had to go through like Haides Hell, sort of inferno, I had a vision that I would have to go through almost seven years of dark nights, at the dives, and the hell holes of society, and explore them.
It does not sound to me as if it was that much of a trial for you, it sounds like you enjoyed every minute of it?
Yes I did. I discovered in 58 or 59 Jean Genet in France, it was all banned all those books, Thieves Journal which was like a stunning book, and in a way I wanted to soar into the sky and feel ecstasy, and I wanted to grovel in the dirt, almost wanted to emulate Genet. Genet was like a criminal, and a male prostitute. For I had no self-esteem myself through my orphanage years and my unhappy childhood, but I was drawn towards the seedier (demi-moral) side. Mixing with lots of people which thrilled me to be abnormal. So I saw in the early sixties in the West End the first person in a cafe in Brewer Street, where a lot happened, a fix, I saw the guy who had lost his leg from fixing. You can do that in a cafe in the evening and fix just down main line, because at that time was all the junkie doctors, Dr. Pamela Frankau. So I was conscious all through that period that there were heroin addicts because if you go down to the hell holes of society you will see people smoking dope, I mean it is almost evanescent. It was in Dolteer Street or Shakespears' time, at Boars Inn, you would go into these late night dives in the West End and you see revelries all through the night and they could have gone on five hundred years ago in the city. There 's something about it, there has always been a low life.
Well it starts with one woman's song and ends up with sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, it's the same thing?
That was very interesting because it all came together in the late fifties, I think it was the first music and drug thing, the modern times as opposed to previous times, and it built up, because I spent a lot of time in the West End in the late fifties and especially the early sixties gathering material for my book. I wrote the play 'Love Play' set in the West End, first LSD fantasy, I got an Arts Council Bursary.
A play about LSD?
Yeah and in the Evening Standard it said 'What a waste of taxpayers LSD'. So I put it on in the Arts Lab in 68. I cut the award, because I had written a play. On my expenses are pep pills, which I an coming to. I wrote 'Buzz Buzz', buzz and pep pills you see. Well I was 27 when the 'mods' came, which was for the mods by 20 you were already too old, it was such a teenage cult and I do not know how I came in touch, I went first to the West End and I was aware at the scene clubs, a whole dance thing, a lot like the Ecstasy generation later.
So you suddenly saw an entirely different audience now?
Yes because what happened suddenly all these, and the age was like 15 to 17, with short hair and the Parkers, a whole lot of young kids, the girls had their hair short and looked like the boys, unisex, the first of the unisex things, and these clubs. A friend of mine ran a club called the Seam club, which Ronin Rahealey ran then, who had another club, Wardour Street and Hen Yard, Wardour Street they had the Flamingo. So already by the early sixties there was the beginnings of this whole new scene, which was the R n B, and the beginning everybody started at these clubs, so Lionel Blake ran the Scene Club, was the principal bouncer, he was later to go to Wormwood scrubs for running a disorderly house when people dropped their pep pills. And that was caused through me, and I will tell you what happened.
So you saw this new scene developing?
I saw this new scene developing, I had left drama school, I had done a bit of acting and I had started writing.
Right, you were living in the West End?
I was living in Earls Court, and I had become a night bird, I would sort of come into the West End at ten at night and leave at five, and sleep during the morning. I mean I was exploring these areas. So suddenly I came to this mod scene, and saw Wardour Street two-three o clock in the morning, hundreds of thousands of kids, and they were drifting into the dives, where in Wardour Muse, which is where the 2/3 famous dives were. And I noticed that they were all chewing gum and big dilated pupils, and started finding out and it was six pence a purple heart, that some of these kids were taking 80 or 90 a weekend, and having amphetamine psychosis, and brilliant dancing, because amphetamine is a perfect stimulant if you want to dance all night. And the clubs would end at five o clock in the evening, and these kids would have nowhere to go, all stoned out of their heads, and the dealers on Wardour Street, were young kids and other people, and also 'pills paradise' was up the road in Goodge Street with Greeks who were selling, and it was a huge big scene. And they were all going in the morning to the seaside, you'd see great gatherings at Waterloo, Liverpool Street, because nobody knew where to go, they all came from Illford and the suburbs, and suddenly huge amounts would end up at the seaside, which was the beginning of the mods and rockers thing. S o it was directly influenced from the amphetamine scene. So that was going quite nicely, and then I bumped into a boy there who was having horrors and bad scenes, and I went to his home and met his father, and he was badly addicted, and I was taping him. How I came to tape him is another story. 63 when this was happening it was the time of Christine Kealer and the Profumo. Now at that time I started smoking cannabis too. I will tell you the story too, because suddenly the Eldorado in Westbourne Grove, Kealer opened up first the cannabis thing, because she used to score the cannabis from in Westbourne Park road, the Eldorado Cafe because that had opened. I suddenly realised that we're in a vast big scene, why I was in the West End, because I was meeting the prostitutes who were involved in the Kealer case, that went to listen to the case, as I had so much free time I would go and queue in Marylebone to listen to Keeler. But this guy Terry Housego and I started smoking cannabis then, but I will tell you, called his MP, who was Ben Parkin, in Paddington, and we thought he said look, Ben Parkin had just made his name exposing Rachmanism, who became very famous because he was the first MP who brought Rachman's activities to parliament, which was an extension of Kealee, so then Parkin said to me, look I do not know anything about pep pills and drugs, there was an interview, I will raise questions in the Houses of Parliament, and then anyone who wants to know, I will give them your telephone number, because I was telling him what this boy's on, this kid's taking 90 pills, this boy his father had.
Is there something you thought was genuinely a problem?
I saw, I'd seen this boy who was having psychosis and going paranoid, kids were starting to get paranoiac, and seeing mice and spiders on the wall, and I suppose I was still an innocent and I was, I do not think I had started cannabis. I was a moralist, a friend of mine said to me, a psychotherapist who was sitting with Ronnie Laing, Sid Briskin said, because I had met Ronnie Laing then too, who had written his book, he said but you are a moralist. Ben Parkin MP brought up the first pep pill things in parliament. I got a call from Anne Sharpley who was a top investigative reporter on the Evening Standard, and did the royal tours and was a Beaverbrook protege, and I became a great friend of hers, and mentioned on her Desert Island Disks at that time 'needles and pins', but she said would you like to show me around the West End, so she was a tall lovely lady, and I said you can not come like that, come looking like this and I am going to take you on a tour of the dives. And I also had, which I had written as a prototype for my plays, a guy I met in 62/63, Johnny Colfer, who is an Irish guy, who not only smoked but was a heroin addict, not a heroin addict then, but was a pep pill addict, he'd take about 80/90 pep pills over the weekend, and chew his teeth, and talk, and when he talked he had a golden gift of the gab. I taped him, I got the tapes now on comedowns and his whole life, on pep pills. I've used them for a abortive book I wrote at the time called 'Living for Kicks', on youth cults, which Panther nearly published, but it was a hotch-botch of a book and liable reasons. but through him, so I introduced Anne Sharpley to him, and he was bubbling and we did a magnificent tour of Wardour Street late at night, where she went outside all the clubs and saw these thousands of young people, and saw the dealers passing the pills, and we went to the dives and that Monday was the heading of the front page of the Evening Standard, beginning of 1964, with a hand with pep pills, 'I See Soho's Pep Pill Craze', and it was the biggest story of the whole week, because the Queen Mothers' operation was the second. So by the Tuesday she had written the story of Johnny Colfer, the boy living on pep pills, the small sad world of, and pills paradise, and blew it open. But that Monday night the West End was deserted, there was not a sixteen year old, though the cops were not busy Monday, Tuesday. Suddenly there were questions in parliament the thousands of pounds the Evening Standard paid for the investigation, which of course I was given free meals and about fifty pounds for. But of course from then onwards I was rung up by Michael Hamlyn of the Sunday Times.
Oh were you in this article?
No, I was the stringer.
Didn't think so?
Yeah because I did not take any drugs, I mean I was a pure moralist, exposing, I was one of the biggest exposes of the time in the press.
That's quite ironic really considering the sort of career path you went to afterwards?
I was implementation, if you see the 1964 Misuse of Drugs Act, I actually when it hit me later and I looked at the Act and I thought 'Oh God I was one of the most important pinnacle in helping to bring forth that which rebounded on my friends.' So there was a terrific hue and cry, it was like the first big drug...Before that when I went with Terry Housego, this guy, to the Hews of the World offices, to see a journalist there, Derek, and look at their cuttings library, he said no, no, we're not interested in a story on mods and pep pills he said because look at the cuttings file, come with me, the only people who take pep pills are housewives in the Rhonda Valley, which the cutting were at that early stage, there weren't any youth associated with pep pills, Because it was not a craze, it all came from Welling Garden City 'Welcome' in Essex, a big factory was stolen, I do not know who was making a fortune.
Well it was a craze apparent?
Yes, it was coming.
The big criminal gains that were letting it happen?
Yes, but suddenly once I had exposed them, in that whole week, and I did quickly take down to the dives all sorts of.
It's probably just as well your name wasn't in the paper?
Exactly, except in the South African papers, I gave an interview that I had questions raised in the Houses of Parliament, I'd seen these kids in terrible, I was like equivalent to a Christian crusader. Though I also was interested in the underground dives, I suppose too, because I was sexually turned on by some of the people there, and had some erotic experiences, which were low life. I suppose coming from this pure prim background I needed to rebel in every way possible, so I suppose it would be inevitable, I decided I did not like pep pills myself, but I loved the dancing in the mod clubs and I loved the R&B and when you went down to the dives in Wardour Muse late at night at that period, it was the best period for dancing you ever saw, by the lesbians, fish dancing and of course all the R&B, all the Otis Redding, My Guy and all that bring memories of me of that period all night, the most primitive, erotic dancing. it was at night in these clubs would come out all these transvestites, all dressed up, and the knives and the lunatics, and everybody. The whole idea of these dives to seven in the morning was you'd dance, and the music, because R&B was in its heyday. what happened in these clubs with the music and these pills, was that all these groups started and I remember going at five o clock one evening to my friend, Lionel ran the Scene Club, to watch the. I forget the name now, who did 'Soot Zoot Suit' and 'I am a Mod' and later the Who, the High Nights with Peter Medin, and I went to the first ever performance at five o clock with our man doing Pete Townsend and his guitar, they had just come, they were going to play there, I mean I met Brian Jones there who is a friend of Lionel Blake, I would go to Brian Jones' flat.
Is this Lionel Blake still around?
I have not seen him in years, he was a South African and a bouncer, but I'll tell you through Lionel I met Paul who big groups who played there, and Georgie Fame, I'd go with him, but I ended up doing him harm. The outcome of my hue and cry in the press which I did took ground, different journalists dressed up to show them, it was a big thing then it spread everywhere, is that the clubs were raided. And a lot of police, and people dropped their pills and my friend Lionel was done for running a disorderly house and got twelve months in prison for it. And I went to visit him and gave an 'affidavit', and I felt terribly ashamed that in my zeal I had caused a bit of trouble for people and destroyed a lot of fun and but I do know that there was a lot of dangerous things going on, but people were young, people were having the horrors, but I was aware that as long as it kept down in the underground, or undergrowth it was all right. But suddenly it was all these ordinary young working class and middle class kids, and at twenty they were too old to be mods, it was essentially a youth thing.
You began to talk about Christine Keeler, the Eldorado, and cannabis, just tell me that?
That was among my spring of journalism and my low life thing, which I have tapes, which I'd showed to Dr. Eustace Chesser in his Harley Street rooms. My other interests besides, I suddenly got obsessive about drugs, because I did not know, but the other thing was sex. So the Keeler thing encompassed both. So I'd read a quote from Roger Gelbert in the New Statesmen on a play he'd written that 'male and female are beach heads of the vast unexplored territory.' So I had a big old grundig in 63 and I lived in Bayswater, and I decided because of the Keeler business, and because I met Julie Gulliver who was the last girlfriend of Steven ward, and I knew some of the prostitutes who had been involved in the Keeler thing. And I lived almost in the area. I went and did three interviews with prostitutes. one was a call-girl who lived in Chelsea Cloisters, and I talked to her in between clients, who would come to her room and cry, and tell her that they were sick of being an accountant, they lived with their mother, and one was a lesbian, who had been beaten in torture chambers, who had been abused terribly as a child and sold her virginity four or five times and had lesbian relationships. And the third one was a street girl from the Chinese street, Chinatown, Gerrard Street, who went with the Chinese waiters and 'Duhai' means business in Chinese, 'come to my loom', and take all her expenses off the Chinese waiters. She was a girl who had been abused by her parents in Cardiff, and the father had gone to prison for sleeping with her for five years. I had this extraordinary low life things which I was going to call 'Living for Kicks'. I was going to write my Genet type work, I would be the man who has seen the low life, of seedy London. And I could open the doors to people who did not know of this life for various reasons. So the Kealer thing was the first coming in the open of cannabis, because we were then aware and also the most important thing because of the Keeler thing and all that, in the mod clubs was coming the first use of 'spliff', of 'draw', because many of the mods liked the West Indian culture. I used to know mods who would shave their hair off and wear berets and talk with west Indian accents. So that was the first, besides pep pills, there was a big coming together of weed, draw, there's a whole lot of names.
Why you seem to be saying something, the expose of Keeler and all that had something to do with the growth of the use of cannabis?
Might well have done, the connection, the whole of 63 was Scandal 63, who is the man in the mask, who wore no clothes? Christine Keeler used to go off from Stephen Wards trial in the case and smoke cannabis, or sleeping and smoking cannabis with the Minister of War I think and the Russian Defence attaché and John Edgecombe. The whole Keeler thing broke of course because of this West Indian, John Edgecombe, who I have met through Howard Marks, who was Christine Keeler's boyfriend who used to score at the Eldorado and smoke, And then he got angry and jealous and other things of the news at Baker Street and came there with a gun, and got shot - he got seven years for that - but that opened all the rest of Stephen Wards thing, I mean that was the beginning of it which unleashed and of course Keeler and Mandy Rice Davis were involved with Rachmanism. And Rachman lived in the Grove. Also at that time I became interested in Rachmanism because of my other reporting things in 64 was exposing the housing conditions of the West Indian immigrants, the Irish people and Rachman were shoving them, whole families into one room at a high price, with one toilet, there were whole estates, I remember before the 63 elections.
Did the smoking cannabis bit around Keeler, did that get publicity as well at that time?
I think there was.
Was that part of the scandal?
Well I would have to research it, but it did, the Edgecombe and Lucky Gordon are still around the Grove. The cannabis thing was very big first among the West Indian community, in the dives with white women who went with them, but it was not open to a general public, because there were lots of people in the early sixties it was starting to go.
Why it drifted at that point? You think it's 63, you began to see these kids who were either used to chew pills and were now smoking dope or had been doing both?
Yes, what happened I can explain it from my own experiences. I was 27. Two things, I first wanted to smoke cannabis, and I had some middle class friends and some gay friends doing it who lived in Holland Park, and oh I must try this and I came with my big Grundig tape recorder and it was 63 and I was going to record the experience and it was a great disappointment, not only didn't I get high, but all I got were these two Jewish girls giggling in a corner who were rather droll. It was very disappointing because I what I would capture on tape was an amazing drug experience of cannabis people are talking about which I wanted to try. Only a little later in the West End in Oxford Street did I meet one of the Irish, because throughout 63 I also hung around in an all night dive in Queensway, and I met this Irish labourer guy also hanged around the West End, and this guy said 'would you like a spliff?' Now he rolled it up two o clock in the morning in Oxford Street, we walked along and we smoked it. And for the first time I suppose I got high on it. Now what you did then was you stayed up all night at the club, the big thing is the West Indians were becoming very big on the mod scene, and the saying was 'nice, man, nice' if you were stoned. So I think with the mods and the pep pills was the beginning for me and lots of people of coming into contact with grass or weed.
Because the mods began to get into black music?
Yes, and all the Otis. And suddenly there was all the West Indian culture, it was part. By the early sixties, 63, there was a beginning of a cannabis culture, which was very linked I suppose more with the mod culture and with the West End and the artists, art students, and the people who went to some coffee bars.
So how is it regarded again, it does not seem to me from a historical view, well it was no part of my life, but it still was not anything political or anything like that around at that time. That's from a later period, it began to get associated with the anti-war movement, students and all that?
Very non-political.
So this was just another way to get smashed basically at that time?
Yes, it was a way of getting high and throughout the mid-sixties of course, also what happened another thing in 63, besides the Keeler thing, I come back to because that was the liberating thing of the sixties. Because soon after that came a Carnaby Street, a 'swinging London'. So I am forgetting that the mod period was also 'I was Lord Kitcheners Vallet', the wearing of the uniforms, and the coming of Mick Jagger and The Beatles in 63. So how much was Keeler, how mush was The Beatles is hard to say but I mean 63 I often think was a defining moment - 67 was the next and a great defining moment for youth culture - in fact almost as big as 67 because it was the coming of the whole British - it happened here rather than in America, like 67 was with the Stones and The Beatles and The Yard Birds and Georgie Fame and all those and they were playing live at the clubs where the kids were. so it was a tremendous, though I was much older, the participant observer, I was fascinated because this was the first. the Elvis Presley in 57 was all right but it was not linked with any drug thing, with alcohol might be.
So how did things develop for you and your involvement in the scene, okay we are into the mid-sixties, you wrote this play didn't you?
Yes well I ended up in 64 writing a play, a one act play called 'Buzz Buzz' and the mods and pep pills with some of the tapes and with the lovely lingo 'watcha watcha Sammy Lee', 'How's it?'. What I met in the West End was what I call the mod cons - a group of five/six really nice guys, who were kids, who were hustlers, or they were on the street, the 'kicksters' I called them. They were the first kids I met who were living for kicks, that would outwit everyone, making life hustle, dealing drugs, had a marvellous lingo, the first sort of, I got a play 'Love Play' and Love Play is written in hippie language. 'I cut out, did you?', 'I split the scene, did you?' So in the early part the rhythmic speech.
Have you still got a copy of this?
I've got copies I'll show you. Buzz Buzz won me an Arts Council and the Star Certificate in Taunby Hall, National Association Youth and Jewish Drama Festival won star certificate. it was the first time, because it was ideal at youth clubs, I had sixteen/seventeen year olds to plat the mods. So I wrote this play, and then I went, I'd had enough of the West End or because it's like a vice, in 64 I went to the docks and I caught a ship and went for four and a half months to Australia, worked on a ship and scored on my way back, the Suez Canal was open then, a bit of weed. Had the chance to Spanishfly or weed. I was sexually propositioned on the boat, some Arab called Sammy Davis, this was a young merchant seaman. And I came back and brought off my little bit of spliff and I had friends in the sixties who then I had actor friends of course I'd been an actor, and I had written this play, I'd written another one, first one was called 'The Kickster More or Less' which was written in 63, which was also about young people, mainly my drama school days. And I just the mid sixties, I also found the social scene so exciting I did not do a regular job, which I an often punished for in later life by my family for living such a dissipated youth, nut throughout until there was so much smoking going on throughout the mid sixties, with arts scenes and everywhere you went. Some people went to Brixton to get it off the dealers, and had an experience with knives and tied up, which you couldn't do anything about that. But mods people in Earls Court and everywhere had little bits, because people were going to India then too, so there was a lot coming back from India.
So people were buying it in London, but also bringing it back from North Africa, and Europe?
Yes and bringing it back from North Africa and India, and usually small parts, no bid organised deals, you had 'Blond Leb' and 'Red Leb' and 'Black', and 'Temple Balls' and 'Afghani' and 'Chitral', and 'Sambuyakquis' and 'Double Zero'. The mid sixties is often the great eras of the marijuana connoisseur. There was an amount of different sorts and the parties were strange then because people did not dance. You went and you sat down and you did not speak all night, which was terrible, you just sat with a lot of other people and someone passed round chillums or joints and you just got stoned, often you could not speak it was so strong. But you just liked being with fellow people, but everyone would smile, you'd have eye contact with strangers.
But presumably this was not the same group of people who were dancing the night away in the clubs, or had your social scene gone?
Lets say I'd suddenly come into a burgeoning scene which had happened, which encompassed not only under twenties, but over twenties, anyone who live din London, likewise in any of the cities, because I think the pep pill thing was a countrywide explosion and usually in the bigger cities. It's hard to remember because the year 64/65/66, because 65 was the Royal Albert Hall thing which was very good.
Poetry thing?
Yes and I did odd jobs, at that time I did actually work for a period as a house-father in a remand home doing reports for boys going on to approved schools and escorting them. Because it was another way of knowing. And I did my psycho-drama and I ended up in 66 being a supply teacher, drama, at a girls secondary modern school in London.
You were going to these parties?
I was going to these clubs and parties, so when the cannabis scene was really coming...
was really coming into culture, where there was by 65 quite a big underground, not only was there the big West End scene, there were all sorts of people interested?
I gave up my job at the remand centre after the poetry evening, which was like quite liberating, the whole beat philosophy that was coming. And also just after that in the beginning of 66, February 66 I have my first LSD trip, which came in a sugar cube, with one of the boys I had met in the West End, one of those mod cons, was an interesting guy. We went off and for two pound fifty at that time we shared a sugar cube, or one each I think, and we took it in the West End. Well it hit me, it was a Saturday night, and we were suddenly in the West End, this thing was coming and we managed to get back. we had a flat in St. Martins Lane in the top of the West end. And I could see certain things and we managed to hit the room, my room I stayed, and suddenly everything exploded and we were talking all at once and all bubbling over each other, did not know what was an hour or a minute, you hit a pot and it went 'dong' and after many hours I suppose and coming down, I went down into the West End, in the dives, and it was extraordinary late at night, with the narcotic squads and all these weird characters and I went into this coffee shop and I sat next to this black heroin addict who said "I feel hungry as a horse, but I feel as if I've been eating a horse all my life." And I remembered marvellous phrases like that for plays you see, and I saw people being searched outside, of course by then was dodgy, the West End was full of the undercover police, and police stopping and searching. And I was later to be stopped and searched in Wardour Muse and had my drug cuttings. Throughout the early sixties, 64/65, I was lecturing on drugs at Goldsmiths College, I'd had, to teachers, to youth clubs, I've got some of the Jewish Youth Club in Stamford House in 66 of my talk on drugs.
What were you telling them?
Well I was trying to give information without necessarily putting people on, I was warning them often against pep pills. But I have some of, I still kept all the archive material. I did that because it was in the papers, it was everywhere, it was the subject, it was so much discussed and I'd done this. What happened then in 65 I think I came back from the Merchant Navy, I was working with drama groups, Jewish drama groups, could have been further education, it so happened it was a very articulate group in Finchley. So I decided with them one day I'd let them read 'Buzz Buzz' and they all loved it. so we thought right I'd put it on, and we entered it for the Association of Jewish Youth Festivals in Toynbee Hall, 'Mods and Pep Pills' and won the star certificate, and was invited to the National union of Youth Clubs by the ejudicator there and I went for the weekend to Chistlehurst and met Lord Willis there, the playwright, who said send me your plays and I will put you up for an Arts Council Bursary. Which I sent in Buzz Buzz and A Kickster More or Less, and gave a biography, and then one day in 66 I had a call from Shaun Day-Lewis at the Daily Telegraph and congratulations Mr Harris you won an Arts Council bursary. So I had my biography and was in the news, in the Guardian, on the drug plays which had been performed at Toynbee Hall and at the Unity Theatre, where in the audience was Dr. Holden from the Tavistock Clinic, Morty Shatzman, all the people who worked with Ronnie Laing, Joe Berke, because I suppose a lot of my influences were also mixing with the circle of R.D. Laing at Kingsley Hall in the early days. So I had the first acid trip which was like the big moment in my life and soon afterwards had my first bust in Wardour Muse in the beginning of 67, with a five bob deal I'd just bought. Because you see in Wardour Muse, you could smoke in the toilets, but once I was in the toilets smoking, someone banging on the doors, was a plain clothed policeman. the cigarette had dropped, so I mean I was taken out and put against the wall. And I had cuttings and a five bob deal and I got a thirty pound fine, but it's a playwrights fine for social workers said in The Guardian in the back page. The journalist that came, that came to do my case, Peter Fiddick, later became editor of The Listener and appears on television as a pundit, was a young journalist. so I had written plays on it and then I was going to write my play 'Love Play' which is on LSD which I wrote during 67, but by the end of 66, October 66, came IT and the beginning of the underground.
Like the spirit of the times in the sixties, lets say the spirit of the times with the coming of the underground, with the coming of LSD I suppose cannabis came of age, in the middle sixties, I'd say at about 66 to 67 because in 1967 was the Congress of the Dialectics of Liberation which I think was in the summer of 66. Pot in that same summer was the legalise Pot Rally, the first one in Hyde Park, so we know that Ginsberg in 1964 had the slogan on a board 'Pot is Fun', with the first sort of Pot Rally. But what culminated there was an underground press and cannabis was part of the sex, drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll. Because those were the issues - sexual freedom, the freedom to take drugs, influenced also by the American scene, with cannabis, the burgeoning culture, and also as when you can say reached the first middle class white students in America, they had to cross over to take it. I think it became, cannabis came out of the underground and became a thing for every middle class youth, who dropped out, due to reading IT or OZ. First it was like in America, a recreational thing, it became 'Peace and Love', as 67 became political, with the coming of the Black Panther Movement in America, the coming of the situations and very yuppie movements, and the Yippies. Political movements here I think did become political to a certain extent, as I said with the Marcuse talk at the Roundhouse.
Tell me about that?
The Congress of the Dialectics of Liberation was a congress to demystify violence and all the greatest minds were here from Gregory Bateson to Sophie Carmichael to Dolce to Earnest Mantel.
Were these philosophers?
Mainly philosophers, academics and poets, creative, brought together by R.D. Laing.
Demystify violence?
Yes, was the heading of it, which seemed very strange because it was a time of great, the coming of great social people.
The Black Panther leader was there?
Yes, telling the hippies "If you believe in peace and love then come with your flowers and put them in the barrels and stand in between the police when they are shooting us." So it was a strange get together of almost a revolutionary thinking, and Marcuse was my great hero, I'd read 'Eros and Civilisation' in 1965 and to this day a lot of the ideas he put through on pleasure and pleasure principles. So he was a great hero. So when he gave his talk at the Roundhouse there was a great deal of preparation because it was as you know a big place, and there was a Maoist slogan coming downwards which someone had painted saying 'Pass the Liberation', and there was going to be joints rolled during his talk and there were many hundreds there.
Was this particularly aimed at Marcuse because of what he'd written?
I think so, I think specifically him, because he'd spoken about in the time of the Paris Communes that people had arrested time, they used to throw stones at the clocks to try and stop time. I mean there was a great revolution, he was conscious of a great revolutionary moment, he was the teacher of Angela Davis at Brandeis University. And he was an elderly man and to me he was almost like seeing one of the greatest thinkers of our time, a man in his seventies there, and suddenly joints were passed round when he was talking and someone came up and handed the old man a joint and he held it in his hand and took a puff and let it go out, but kept it as he was talking. So that I suppose was a political thing and what made it political too is there was a backlash. Once the flower people and the beautiful people came, all sorts, cannabis was not the only drug. The beginning of 'Flower Power' was a period with methedrine, Earls Court and London was rife with people fixing speed, so if you went to all theses certain pads, there were all sorts of bad drugs going around.
Wasn't that 68?
Well throughout 67 the scene was so bad, in other words when Ginsberg came over for the Roundhouse thing, he was in Piccadilly Circus and he said get rid of speed freaks, they destroy, and all the lovely people, the love scene was killed by two things - too many people taking too many drugs, and methedrine as well as cannabis, and there was a backlash. Once the 'Summer of Love' was just for two months, October of that year, September you could not walk through a place like Earls Court or anywhere without endless stops and searches. So where in 67 the 'Legalise Pot Rally' there was no search without a warrant, because there were so many police busting into places.
Do you know why that was? That was because of the 1967 Dangerous Drugs Act which I was looking at the other day, which for the very fist time allowed the police to do stops and searches just for drugs. And that was the first bit of legislation which allowed them to do that.
That's why it also helped make it political because once people are persecuted it becomes political, it's a personal act, because I feel a lot of people were politicised by the ruthless action of the police, people were looked up, also the bad overdoing of heroin and methedrine. There were places which were absolutely terrible because the beautiful people attracted a lot of unstable people within the movement and many people that had breakdowns. But then the second thing that politicised it and in a sense did not politicise it, when 68 came and the hippies developed into the radical Left and there was a schism because the Left were far too puritanical, the 'angry brigade', drugs were a bourgeois thing.
People do not fight if you're stoned out of your eyes?
Yes, so drug takers or cannabis people were marginalised though I do feel because of the underground press they played an important part. But I think the spliff became part of the revolution, but to certain purer elements it was against there. There's in a Buddhist book later, my Guru is Trogan Trungpa, I've never met him but I've read the books. When the thing was very big, the cannabis in America, and everyone was going to, when he moved to Boulder from Sam E Ling in England and was the founder of the Naropa Institute, and he had another place somewhere in America where all the hippies came to him, they were all attracted to Buddhism because of cannabis. So they all went to sit and meditate and everyone would be smoking lots of cannabis and then he got mad and he said 'it is self-delusion' and made everyone throw their joints in a big fire and someone refused to know and they had a fist fight, he had with them. Where they had to, mentioned by different people in different books throw all this stuff saying the devil or the self-delusion into the fire because then it was stopped. If you wanted to advance spiritually you had to let go of it, and also if you wanted to be a violent political person which was part of that struggle, then you had to let go of any pleasure, the pleasure principle. So I think politically did not come of age because it was not organised politically, then there was a marvellous Legalise Pot Rally, some of us who were here was a pure magical time, because it was a beautiful poster which you most probably have seen, some people have seen it framed on their wall. I used to sell all of them in the West End, I wish I had kept some. And I do not know how it got about that it was July 4, I arrived and I had photos in The Guardian, there with the kaftan with the neck and I had some thorns in my hair. And I walked from West Kensington and kids were shouting, 'hello Jesus, or Julius Ceasar' and I had dark glasses on and my friends were pissing themselves laughing, we were all in a tube and everybody looked at each other and I quickly got out the next stop and I took a taxi and arrived at Hyde Park and there were thousands of people with the most beautiful face painting, hair styles and could not hear Erik Clapton with lovely curly hair then, and we all dressed up. We were all the beautiful people, it was like amazing, it was like a fancy dress party, and of thousands. I'm still shown on T.V., with Allen Ginsberg and Steve Abrams, in a shot whenever they show on the sixties. And I enjoyed all the fuss and appearing the weekend and latent rebellion and then we all walked to the Stones to the Albert Hall all together, and David Mandala and the Exploding Galaxy, I mean everybody knew each other. Looking back it was a very dilettantish, like the underground was very upper middle class and public school, full of Americans from refugees from the draft, the Vietnamese War. And by the time it hit the anti-Vietnam demonstrations in Grosvenor Square, I mean I do not think they played such an important part in that.
This is another interesting point, because what we are talking about to me any way, if you like, the sixties were happening in London, in the way that you, but I do not know if you ever did, if you had gone to Ipswich, or Folden or Bristol or Birmingham or Hartlepool I mean would you have found the 'sixties'?
I think so. Two points. First of all, yes, because a few years later by 69 were the first Isle of Wight concerts, with Bob Dylan, which I happened to go and traded at there. And by then there was a whole burgeoning movement a hundred thousand people who smoked dope came from all over the UK not only London, so it shows there was a I think also in that early time there were because people were going to India, and were going from Glasgow, they were going throughout the late sixties, you could go on the overland trail remember, the Hash Trail to Kathmandu I mean, and you went through Afghanistan in 1979 there was a coup, I published the 'Overland Guide to India' in 1972 which was what hash you could get in what part of the country too, because it was part of the vegetarin and macrobiotic movement later. So I think it was all over there. The second thing, as my mother was dying from October 67 to June 68, I'm at the height of the Arts Lab, which I'd help form, which also denigrated through drug use and ended up being in the West End with all the rubbish to stay over there. I was in south Africa during that period, I was in Israel, and I was in Kenya for 12 days, but wherever I moved in that period, there was a burgeoning, when I came back to South Africa there was a, I've got some cuttings, but there was the King and Queen of the Hippies there they called them, I mean you could not as a stranger, I could go anywhere in those places and find, in Israel, cannabis within 24 hours. In Kenya at a Julie Felix concert on my first night there, and the peace corp from America were in Kenya smoking. So it was a world-wide thing, when suddenly all your cousins in south Africa who would not dream of it the generation before, had all taken cannabis. So it was a world-wide. In Israel it was very big among intellectuals and young kids.
Something you mentioned earlier, an interesting point you made about South Africa, like the people who wanted to kind of burn down synagogues for smoking dope?
Yes if one believes that cannabis was political in one sense peace and love. Not only political but it was spiritual because it could lift you to awakened heights, centred, can make you peaceful, can make you aware and loving. But I did find out coming to South Africa and meeting smokers there with long hair, and called themselves Afrikaans, suddenly if you mentioned 'race', you'd find there were bigots as anyone else.
They were just racists with long hair?
Yes and that smoking cannabis did not necessarily make you a nice person, and that all sorts of people smoke cannabis.
Okay, we've been in the early seventies, you said you noticed that in a sense you talk about the end of the 'Acid Dream', and that interesting drugs began to tail off.
I mean yes, by as I said the 'Summer of Love' was just a fickle summer almost, it was such a short, split second in history, and then the backlash, in the press was very heavy, and there were the casualties of the love of war, people who did not quite take to acid, who were smoking far too much, smoking chillums, I remember a girl who would sit in a circle of guys and smoke. one was astounded how much, and I think people sat about in the late sixties and got stoned a lot and did nothing, people were lost for purpose. And all the people who took acid, the acid converts, became spiritual, but by virtue that by 71 or 72 someone handed in 71/72 I published the 'Alchemical Handbook : Alchemical Almanac and Handbook of Herbal Highs' which had the first and for Cannabis Action Reform Organisation, because Release had started the first separate organisation which was run from Nicholas Saunders' office and had turned out to be someone who disliked cannabis very much, and thinks in his book 'Ecstasy' he puts it as 'probably more harmful than tobacco, both in terms of addiction and cancer' he says, the late Nicholas Saunders. And Lord Melched was on the committee, Cannabis Action Reform Organisation. So there was a big meeting by Release to try and get something, but due to apathy or various things, nothing came of CARO. But most people at that time were going on the hash trail to India, you could go and get a passport, and someone came with a manuscript he had done, a vegetarian, the dope trippers overland guide to India, which I published which was the 'Overland Guide to the East' which is an amazing book because it exemplified and he was the first disciple in 72 of Rajnisch the Orange Order, that was in an early time before he was well known, so people came on the hash trail and ended up on the guru trip. The whole suddenly, especially with divine light, someone said when he spoke in the Hippodrome in Golders Green or something, 'Time Out' heading was 'A Guru in Golders Green Already' and fifty thousand middle class youth turned on to that is the little boy guru, and posters used to be 'God is alive and well and living in Kilburn'. And I bumped into some hippies who were giving out posters with them and I said oh I knew he had a mother, I said 'What is God's mother like?'. This girl said 'Oh she's beautiful'. Because it became rather ridiculous, and all these people turned off dope, so for a time dope sort of lost its lustre. I think the early seventies were very but meanwhile I started in 1972, I ended up in the Portobello Road, ended up because my play flopped at the Arts Lab, projects I was involved in, I went through a mid life crisis, I was 35 then, nothing seemed to make sense, all my artistic endeavours, my plays, I suddenly found here I was in mid life and I did not know how to earn a buck. I'd lived in such an airy-fairy underground, tune in drop out you see. I had become a drop out, and its no fun and I never went on the dole, I mean friends helped, supported me and I ended up in a very difficult time. Well the Freak Brothers saying in the sixties from Freewheeling Frank 'Dope will get you through times of no money, better than money will get you through times of no dope.' Something like that. Well in a sense I think I found that in that very dark period, my mother died in 68 and it hit me, I did not let it and went through terrible guilt, blown the little bit of money I'd been left. At the Phun City which was a big festival which had been mentioning music. I will go before I started the 'Head Shop' was as Phun City which was the last of the great festivals, which Mick Farren did at Worthing. Fun spelt PHUN and MC5 were brought from America, and it was a terribly chaotic festival where I lost a lot of money, but complained by transport company, and there were people tripping, running about naked, and scaring the ice-cream van man and his wife, and all sorts of things went wrong. I was threatened by this Carter who had the food concession, and the Hell's Angels defended me because I was on the front page of 'Friends' magazine, 'One Ice-cream Vendor Lee Harris'. Because a lot of the festivals were then very drug associated, they were endlessly sitting with the police round them, I remember very well, I am a veteran of all the festivals, I traded at so it was natural for me when a pitch fell through when at Portobello Road to land there. the first thing, I'd gone through this mid life thing and I discovered Ginseng, which is the herb that hides from men, from a Chinese shop, so I found this very expensive herb which cost nine pounds, 25 years ago or more, and I had terrific feelings, all my energy rejuvenated, I felt physically good, I felt coming out of the depression too and so I started sort of to be a medicine head, with Tiger Balm, Herbs and cannabis as the 'healing herb'. I started Alchemy, which came from the 'Alchemical Wedding' which was at the Royal Albert Hall in 18/12/68, when John Lennon and Yoko Ono were there, and Ken Kesey, that is another story I was very involved in the organising of that. Where people stripped naked at the Albert Hall, which made front page headlines in the next days London Evening News. People thought when you took drugs at that time you took your clothes off, it shows you do not need to do that. I ended up in the Portobello Road selling chillums. Almost everyone I knew was coming back from India, bringing all these exotic objects like chillums, and balm, and patchouli oil and incense. I was a long haired hippy with a beard, and the smocks and the babushas and we liked to trade at festivals, with your cloth out, with your shawl off, laid out and sell. Like I'd started off in the West End before as an anarchist trader selling psychedelic posters in the late sixties you see because I did not know how to make a living. I ended up in the Portobello Road, making chokers first because that was the in thing with beads, like Henna paintings now, lot of things that came in, cultural things 25 years ago are now big in fashion. Now everyone is doing Mendhi or henna painting. At that time all the boys used to henna their hair, as well as the girls, because in 1972 I published henna instructions, because there was a whole oriental trip, so cannabis was associated, was the hash trail, everyone was coming back with little bits, no great dealing. I mean people had the amazing sort, in the Great Books of Hashish has that great period, which was before the big time dealer came, the subsidise. Well I think it was still too associated with the hippies, though I think of the seizure in Picadilly, the big squat was started too at that time. I think often squatters had to be careful. I started my 'head shop' because there had been a head shop in Portobello before me, one in Norwich called 'Head in the Clouds' which is a year older than me, run by an amazing guy called Martin, to sell all over the country, was not only London. I met Brian Talbot who wrote the comic because in 1972 he came to see me and he started a head shop in a basement as a young student in Preston called White Rabbit. Little cultures were opening, especially because after the late sixties people were moving out of London, because it was linked with the underground - vegetarianism and cottages in the country, big communities moved into Norfolk, and Wales because the dreamers to get out of the city into a normal life, where if possible you could grow your own, and eat organic food. It was a big moment, people often forget, a great exodus, which later came when I moved here by 75. 74 was the Barsham Fair, the first of the Albion Fairs that existed in East Anglia which the convoy later destroyed in the early eighties and they came and everything they touched, the so-called 'peace convoys'. But it came to the early seventies, and it was radical, and it was the Windsor free festivals, it was the Stonehenge, and the free festivals on the Brecon Pass where you smoked the knives with guys from Liverpool in a bottle - hot knives. I mean lets say and the comics because it came from the underground comics, it was a culture but it was still, this was five years after 67.
Had it kind of sort of gone in a sense 'bang', 'splash' all over the newspaper, London is the hippest place on earth, and then the early seventies the scene kind of diminishes and spreads out at the same time?
Yes and also comes into conflict with the mid seventies too, with the Labour collectives. So you had Release and every town like Norwich had a Sunwheel bookshop which was run by collectives. As they were left-wing collectives often they would not take something to do with herbs or drugs because it was not socialist. In a sense you can not mix it up. It is not political or revolutionary in that sense.
So in terms of the society had gone big, had subsided, but at the same time as it subsides, the people move out of London, and kind of take the culture with them in a sense?
It became also a bit by the mid seventies onwards it was almost to become a dinosaur, after ten years, once it had come, it was almost yawn, yawn, yawn, it had played out.
But then there was Reggae?
Yes
That kind of brought cannabis?
Reggae brought cannabis back very much because in the earlier seventies there was nothing going on, everything was stifled and the times were rather grim, you must remember 73 was the oil crisis and because I find in all of this when I am thinking back you forget the spirit of the times is so much a part of how things happened.
Is it a 'downer' time, quite a lot of heroin about?
Yes, I think if you find, definitely that was the time when there was a big barbiturate and mandrax. That is interesting because Portobello Road was heavy mandrax and barbiturate people. Also in the eighties was a big barbiturate period. But definitely I'd say around 72 was my period of John Snow and the Horizon Centre which was a big heroin scene and there were lots of ugly scenes. there were 2 sides at that time, 72 was the beginning of macrobiotics. So people. But macrobiotic and the health thing and anti-dope thing too, because there were people cutting their hair short and joining gurus, so I would say there were still people who liked the culture, due to the Jimi Hendrix 'Keep the freak flag flying high'. It became almost keep your hair long.
That kind of assembled itself into like you say Stonehenge, free festivals, it kept it all bubbling along?
Yes and there many festivals happened all over the country where you were lucky to partake but you knew would be stopped and searched to get there. In the grounds you could be, there were road blocks everywhere, you lived in a seiged state if you smoked cannabis. I mean it was a very difficult time. I was raided in 72 in someone's house.
A complete and properly edited version of this interview will appear here soon.